Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

During that period I was convinced that there was no great difference between the neighborhood and Naples, the malaise slid from one to the other without interruption. Whenever I returned I found a city that was spineless, that couldn’t stand up to changes of season, heat, cold, and, especially, storms. Look how the station on Piazza Garibaldi was flooded, look how the Galleria opposite the museum had collapsed; there was a landslide, and the electricity didn’t come back on. Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. The clogged sewers splattered, dribbled over. Lavas of water and sewage and garbage and bacteria spilled into the sea from the hills that were burdened with new, fragile structures, or eroded the world from below. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable. As soon as I got off the train, I moved cautiously in the places where I had grown up, always careful to speak in dialect, as if to indicate I am one of yours, don’t hurt me .

When I graduated from college, when, in a single burst, I wrote a story that in the space of a few months became, surprisingly, a book, the things of the world I came from seemed to me to deteriorate even further. In Pisa, in Milan, I felt good, at times even happy; upon every return to my own city I feared that some unexpected event would keep me from escaping, that the things I had gained would be taken away from me. I would be unable to reach Pietro, whom I was soon to marry; the tidy space of the publishing house would be barred to me; I would no longer enjoy the refinements of Adele, my future mother-in-law, a mother as mine had never been. Already in the past the city had seemed to me crowded, a crush from Piazza Garibaldi to Forcella, to Duchesca, to Lavinaio, to the Rettifilo. In the late sixties the crush seemed to intensify, while impatience, aggressiveness spread without restraint. One morning I ventured out to Via Mezzocannone, where some years earlier I had worked as a clerk in a bookstore. I went because I was curious to see the place where I had toiled, and also to see the university, where I had never been. I wanted to compare it with the university in Pisa, the Normale, I was even hoping I might run into the children of Professor Galiani — Armando, Nadia — and boast of what I had accomplished. But the street, the university buildings had distressed me. They were teeming with students from Naples and the province and the whole South, well-dressed, noisy, self-confident youths, and others, rough yet inferior. They thronged the entrances, the classrooms, stood in long, often quarrelsome lines in front of the secretaries. Without warning, three or four started hitting each other a few steps from me, as if the mere sight of one another were sufficient for an explosion of insults and blows, a fury of boys shouting their craving for blood in a dialect that I myself had difficulty understanding. I left in a hurry, as if something threatening had touched me in a place that I had imagined safe, inhabited only by good reasons.

Every year, in other words, it seemed to me worse. In that season of rains, the city had cracked yet again, an entire building had buckled onto one side, like a person who, sitting in an old chair, leans on the worm-eaten arm and it gives way. Dead, wounded. And shouts, blows, cherry bombs. The city seemed to harbor in its guts a fury that couldn’t get out and therefore eroded it from the inside, or erupted in pustules on the surface, swollen with venom against everyone, children, adults, old people, visitors from other cities, Americans from NATO, tourists of every nationality, the Neapolitans themselves. How could one endure in that place of disorder and danger, on the outskirts, in the center, on the hills, at the foot of Vesuvius? What a brutal impression San Giovanni a Teduccio had left on me, and the journey to get there. How brutal the factory where Lila was working, and Lila herself — Lila with her small child, Lila who lived in a run-down building with Enzo, although they didn’t sleep together. She had said that he wanted to study computers, and that she was trying to help him. I still remember her voice, as it tried to erase San Giovanni, the salami, the odor of the factory, her situation, by citing with false expertise abbreviations like: Cybernetics Center of the State University of Milan, Soviet Center for the Application of Computer Science to the Social Sciences. She wanted to make me believe that a center of that type would soon be established even in Naples. I had thought: in Milan maybe, certainly in the Soviet Union, but here no, here it is the folly of your uncontrollable mind, into which you are dragging even poor, devoted Enzo. Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

I talked about it with Lila that afternoon, in the winter of 2005, emphatically and as if to make amends. I wanted to acknowledge openly that she had understood everything since she was a girl, without ever leaving Naples. But I was almost immediately ashamed, I heard in my words the irritable pessimism of someone who is getting old, a tone I knew she detested.

In fact, in a nervous grimace of a smile that showed her old teeth, she said: “Are you playing the know-it-all, the moralizer? What do you intend to do? You want to write about us? You want to write about me?”

“No.”

“Tell the truth.”

“It would be too complicated.”

“You’ve thought about it, though, you’re thinking about it.”

“A little, yes.”

“Let me be, Lenù. Let us all be. We ought to disappear, we deserve nothing, neither Gigliola nor me, no one.”

“That’s not true.”

She had an ugly expression of discontent, and she scrutinized me, her pupils hardly visible, her lips half parted.

“All right,” she said, “write, if you want, write about Gigliola, about whoever you want. But about me no, don’t you dare, promise.”

“I won’t write about anyone, not even you.”

“Careful, I’ve got my eye on you.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I’ll erase them.”

“Come on.”

“You think I’m not capable of it?”

“I know you’re capable. But I can protect myself.”

She laughed in her old mean way.

“Not from me.”

I have never forgotten those three words; it was the last thing she said to me: Not from me . For weeks now I’ve been writing at a good pace, without wasting time rereading. If Lila is still alive — I imagine as I sip my coffee and look out at the Po, bumping against the piers of the Principessa Isabella bridge — she won’t be able to resist, she’ll come and poke around in my computer, she’ll read, and, cantankerous old woman that she is, she’ll get angry at my disobedience, she’ll want to interfere, correct, add, she’ll forget her craving to disappear. Then I wash the cup, go back to the desk to write, starting from that cold spring evening in Milan, more than forty years ago, in the bookstore, when the man with the thick eyeglasses spoke derisively about me and my book in front of everyone, and I replied in confusion, shaking. Until suddenly Nino Sarratore stood up and, almost unrecognizable with his unruly black beard, harshly attacked the man who had attacked me. Right then my whole self began to silently shout his name — how long had it been since I’d seen him: four, five years — and although I was ice-cold with tension I felt myself blushing.